


Illumination

by wintergrey



Series: Marvel Snax [7]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Drabble, Ficlet, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-07
Updated: 2014-05-07
Packaged: 2018-01-23 20:57:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1579301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wintergrey/pseuds/wintergrey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for Monster because she linked to something about Bucky and Steve and storms. This could be OOC, I really need to see CATWS, I'm mostly going off CA and my old school comics memories. I blame Roane for making me think about it.</p><p>So, you know. Don't look at it. Or something.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Illumination

**Author's Note:**

  * For [a_xmasmurder](https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_xmasmurder/gifts).



It’s one of those storms that shakes everything. Stark Tower sways slightly—not enough for most people to feel but the shift registers as Steve treks along a curving outer hall. The wall to his left is all glass, black with midnight one moment and white with lightning the next, leaving purple after-images gleaming in his blinded eyes when the light is gone again. Thunder crashes so hard and close the waves of it break against his skin like a sea of sound. He could drown in it. 

Sightless and disoriented, Steve still knows where he is by touch and memory. The door opens at his touch. That it’s unlocked is as good as a welcome. The lights are off inside but, between the marbles-on-glass rattle of rain and the raging bull roar of thunder, he can hear breathing. The room lights up with unbearable white except for the velvet black absence of light that makes up the silhouette at the window. 

Steve finds the window control with his thumb and brings a wall of steel down between them and the world. The storm is distant now and they are in the still dark of a closed room that is full of the sound of how empty it is except for them. 

“You won’t make it better that way,” Steve says.

“Who says that’s why I’m doing it?” Bucky hasn’t moved, Steve can tell by the way his voice sounds against the glass he’s facing. “Self-improvement was always your thing.”

“Well. You were perfect to begin with.” Steve knows too much is coming through in his voice but it’s worth it when Bucky laughs. Snorts, really, but it’s enough. 

“Only by comparison.” Now, Bucky moves and moments later his body hits the bed with a weight that Steve is only beginning to accept as his. 

“I resemble that remark.” He finds a place at the foot of the bed, the foot rails cool against his back through his thin T-Shirt. 

“Resembled,” Bucky says, and his foot bumps lightly against Steve’s thigh, sending a jolt more electric than the lightning through him. “You’re the pretty one now.”

“Can I get that in writing?” Steve runs his fingers over the top of Bucky’s foot before he can stop himself. _He started it_. “I know you. As soon as you’re feeling better, you’ll deny ever saying that.”

“Saying it, sure.” The bed shifts as Bucky sits up and Steve’s fingers slip away from his cool skin. The loss of the touch makes his nerve endings ache. 

Instead he casts about for any source of light and there’s nothing but the tiny faux-radium glow of two analog clock hands by the head of the bed. 01:12, if Steve has the angles right. Better to think about those angles than the meaning behind Bucky’s words. 

“You’re wrong about it not making things better,” Bucky says, just before the silence hardens into something too dense for comfort. 

“How?” Steve can smell the anxious sheen on Bucky’s skin from here, just inches away. It doesn’t register as better. 

“You came.” Bucky inhales sharply, the pain in that small noise is a knife that goes right between Steve’s ribs. “That makes it better.” 

“This time.” That’s the part that hurts. “I came this time.”

“You have some other time you’re not telling me about?” Bucky laughs again unexpectedly, more than the first time, and it’s like salve on that pain between Steve’s ribs. “Holding out on me?”

“No. Before, I didn’t know.” Why he’s the one talking when he’s supposed to be here for Bucky is beyond him. Some things never change. “If I’d known...” 

The loop runs endlessly behind all his other thoughts. _I didn’t know. If I’d known... I didn’t know. If I’d known..._ There is no solution for it. There is no fixing the past. He still can’t accept it. “I didn’t know.”

“There’s a lot of things you don’t know, kid.” There’s no irritation in Bucky’s voice—he sounds more like his old self now, just now tucked away in the dark pocket of the small hours of the stormy night, than he has since he returned to himself. 

“Tell me something I don’t know.” No one’s called him ‘kid’ in decades, not Bucky, not anyone. It used to make him itch under the skin with frustration, and other things, when Bucky did it way back when. Now it feels like the compass in his chest finally remembers which way is North. “Surprise me.” 

“I like this time. Now. Wouldn’t trade it in. May not like how I got here...” Something flickers between Steve and the hands of the clock—Bucky’s prosthetic hand. “But I wouldn’t go back.”

That is actually a surprise, so much so that the muscles in Steve’s back and gut twitch as though he’s been startled. “Why?” comes out of him unbidden. 

Even in the dark he can feel Bucky’s eyes on him, knows Bucky doesn’t need light to see his face any more than he needs light to see Bucky. He knows, he knows what was there before and what’s there now, clear as looking at a photograph printed indelibly in his mind. He’s so busy looking at that picture he doesn’t process the warmth of Bucky’s body looming close and the brush of breath on his lips until Bucky’s mouth is on his. 

It doesn’t just explain the why, it answers questions he’s been carrying somewhere between his spine and sternum nearly all his life. Suddenly things are so very clear, perfectly clear, and he doesn’t want to go back in time after all. 

Lightning strikes the tower, more than once, then the thunder comes and Steve wraps both arms around Bucky to soothe the way he startles because that’s why he came here at all. To make it better. To be made better. 

“You’re right,” he says, when the thunder rolls back and leaves their ears ringing and his voice strangely loud in the silence. He hardly needs to talk, he knows Bucky can read his lips, feel them moving against his own. “It’s better.”

“Trust me, kid.” He can feel it when Bucky smiles in spite of the tension that lingers in the lines of his back. It’s almost all bravado but that’s enough for now. “I know what I’m doing.”

“You do.” Steve lets him lead. “I remember.”


End file.
